Thursday, February 19, 2015

Usually bitter adversaries, Koch Industries and the Center for American Progress have found at least one thing they can agree on: The nation’s criminal justice system is broken.

Koch
Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative Koch brothers,
and the center, a Washington-based liberal issues group, are coming
together to back a new organization called the Coalition for Public
Safety. The coalition plans a multimillion-dollar campaign on behalf of
emerging proposals to reduce prison populations, overhaul sentencing,
reduce recidivism and take on similar initiatives. Other groups from
both the left and right — the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans
for Tax Reform, the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks — are also part of the coalition, reflecting its unusually bipartisan approach.

The
coalition will have initial backing of more than $5 million, with
groups also spending independently on their own criminal justice
initiatives.

With
the huge costs to the public of an expanding 2.2 million-person prison
population drawing interest from the right and the conviction that the
system is unfair and incarcerating too many drug and nonviolent
offenders driving those on the left, the new coalition is the most
recent example of ideological opposites joining together.

Last year, Senators Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, and Rand Paul,
Republican of Kentucky, together wrote legislation aimed at helping
nonviolent offenders seal their records. This month, Senator John Cornyn
of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, and Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, introduced legislation aimed at
cutting prison populations by allowing eligible prisoners to reduce
their time.

Naturally, this a lot of feel good rhetoric which, at this point, hasn't produced anything tangible yet. Whether running on criminal justice reform, rather than good old fashioned criminal retribution, actually wins elections remains to be seen.

But for today, anyway, could hope really spring eternal on this issue? Hold your fire.

As gun rights advocates push to legalize firearms on college campuses,
an argument is taking shape: Arming female students will help reduce
sexual assaults.

This
year, lawmakers in 10 states who are pushing bills that would permit
the carrying of firearms on campus are hoping that the national
spotlight on sexual assault will help them win passage of their
measures.

“If
you’ve got a person that’s raped because you wouldn’t let them carry a
firearm to defend themselves, I think you’re responsible,” State
Representative Dennis K. Baxley of Florida said during debate in a House subcommittee last month. The bill passed.

The sponsor of a bill in Nevada, Assemblywoman Michele Fiore,
said in a telephone interview: “If these young, hot little girls on
campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them.
The sexual assaults that are occurring would go down once these sexual
predators get a bullet in their head.”

LOL. So, to address the point above, if you think exploiting crime for political capital is a dead horse all of a sudden, think again.

I suppose arming potential rape victims may not lead to more people filling our prisons and jails (yet), but maybe the gun advocates are on to something. Hell, if enough victims just "take out" the bad guys, then we won't need no dang prisons and jails anymore anyhow. Dagummit.

It’s unclear, however, whether allowing concealed handguns on
campuses would deter sexual assaults or perhaps even render them more
likely, by making it easier for potential perpetrators to arm
themselves.

Although researchers on campus sexual assault may sharply differ in their estimates of its prevalence,
they generally agree on these two points: The perpetrators are most
likely to be men that the victims have known and trusted, and are much
less likely to have overcome a woman by pure physical force than they
are to have taken advantage of one incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.

United Educators, an insurance and risk-management firm, examined 305 claims from 104 colleges it insures involving alleged sexual assaults of students from 2011 through 2013. It found
that 90 percent of victims knew the perpetrator, 84 percent of the
perpetrators were students, 78 percent of the assaults involved alcohol,
and one in three victims were drunk, passed out, or asleep.

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